Poetry

The hands are useful objects – prime evolutionary tools.Consider:The fingertips encourage people to convict burglars;The nails, painted, may excite lust or love;Knuckles can be broken with excruciating agonyAnd fingers explore private parts while wearing tokens of identification;Also palm-lines make a practical alternative to tea leaves,While the heels of the hands conveniently cover the eyesWithout obstructing the tear ducts.

(1972, published Ambit magazine 1992.)

(Posted 30 May, 2018.)

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“The land stands silent..”

The land stands silent in the sun:Solid; green; encompassed; known;Till a crow’s caw sounds, like a great door opening,And makes of the dark wood an inhabited thing.

Debts of gratitude here far longer than the poem. First, to Diagram (Visual Information) Ltd., then of Goswell Road in London, for allowing for a time a work arrangement that triggered an intense period of creativity. Second, to a former fellow graduate student at Essex, Chris Game, for inviting me on a day’s visit to Cliveden House (then an overseas campus of Stanford University), where this was unexpectedly written. But mostly to William Cookson of Agenda, for being the first to think there might be something publishable in my versifying. William, who’d founded Agenda as a young man under the encouragement of Ezra Pound, tried very hard to find anything else in my poetry that he could like – but never succeeded!